


We May as Well Go Too Far

by Fudgyokra



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Crossing Timelines, Damian is Slade's adopted son in this dimension, Dirty Talk, Future Fic, Humor, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn with very little plot at least, Pseudo-Incest, Timeline Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-04-28 05:22:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14442255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fudgyokra/pseuds/Fudgyokra
Summary: When Bruce and his boys accidentally get pitched into the future of an alternate universe, Dick runs into a handsome stranger at his hideout. The rest is history… Sort of.





	We May as Well Go Too Far

**Author's Note:**

> Partly inspired by an absolutely wonderful piece of art: daddyschlongleg.tumblr.com/post/147107117910

Between Wally and Barry, the space-time continuum could do with a little bit of divine intervention. When Dick voices the thought, Jason is the only one who laughs, but that’s to be expected.

“We need to focus,” Bruce admonishes. He has the rapturous attention of everyone in the room—and, well, it isn’t really a room so much as a tent, but Dick supposes it’s large enough to count as such—because not one of them is sure where they are, or even _when._

In the corner stands Barry, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “I swear it wasn’t me, Bruce,” he’s saying, not that anyone is listening to him after his most recent assault on the timeline. “Something foreign interfered.”

“Something like a god?” Dick tries again. Just like before, Jason laughs, although this time it’s more of a snort-chuckle hybrid.

Bruce growls a curse, and it takes them all a second to realize it’s not in response to Dick but to something he’s reading on a piece of tech he has attached to his wrist, which he adamantly refuses to call “the Bat-watch” despite the boys’ ample attempts at suggesting it. Before he can bother explaining whatever phenomenon it is he’s witnessed, Barry zips back into the tent with a soft whoosh of air and gives an emphatic, “Uh-oh,” by way of reintroducing himself. Dick honestly hadn’t even noticed he’d left, but that was a particular talent of all the Speedsters.

“‘Uh-oh’?” Tim asks with a frown. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“Seldom does ‘uh-oh’ ever mean anything good,” Damian retorts. Dick smiles at that, and when Damian notices, he applies his own version; it’s little more than a slight upward twitch to one corner of his mouth, but Dick and the rest have learned to read it as if it were a full-on smile. No one else notices this time besides him, though.

Tim is groaning at something Barry has said, which Dick managed to wholly miss thanks to his private bubble of peace. Apparently, though, Damian was capable of escaping to his own bubble without missing crucial plot points, because he sizes Barry up and says, “Well, in that case, I do not gauge returning home to be much of a hurdle.”

“You’re kidding,” Tim deadpans.

Damian crosses his arms over his chest and looks up at Dick. “Care to fill Drake in on the obvious?”

Dick offers a less-than-impressive, “Um.”

Tim snorts. Damian sighs and says, “I must have misinterpreted your knowing smile, Grayson. I thought we were on the same page.”

“No one ever knows what Dick’s thinking,” Jason puts in, unhelpfully.

They all turn back to Bruce, who was rubbing his chin between thumb and forefinger in the way he does when things start coming together. “Damian is right,” he says, but something about his tone is less than confident, and that brings Dick’s brows into a high furrow on his face.

“Let me guess,” Jason says, this time supplying something actually on mark, “we’re missing one key element to a plan that would otherwise have us home in a jiffy.”

“Please don’t ever use the term ‘in a jiffy’ again,” Tim says, and Jason pinches him hard on the arm.

“That’s exactly correct,” Bruce answers. He fiddles some more with his not-Bat-watch and pauses only to assess his team, which consists solely of his pack of grown children and Barry, whose profile is, absurdly, the one best-defined by the term ‘grown child.’ He reaches out, puts a hand on Barry’s shoulder, and looks him in the eye with a special brand of seriousness. “Barry, I’ll need your help finding this universe’s Bruce Wayne. Boys, I want you to try and locate any living Speedster. Judging by the year, your best bet will be Bart Allen.”

“Say hi for me,” Barry says.

“Be careful,” Bruce says. “We don’t know personal alignments in this universe, and we can’t afford to be caught off-guard if we find that there’s another ill-tempered Kal-El out there somewhere looking for blood.”

Barry raises his hands in a _do not panic_ gesture. “Everything outside looks fine, though. Don’t worry too much.”

“They worry just enough,” Bruce grunts, just before he takes the man by the arm and directs him bodily to the tent’s entrance. “We need to go now, before it gets dark.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Barry says, and in a flash— _ha, ha, Dick thinks_ —they’re out of sight.

After Jason strides across the tent to poke his head out and observe god-knows-what, Damian and Tim begin conspiring. “I think we should start by finding a map,” the latter suggests.

“You heard what Father said,” the former starts, tone unsurprisingly argumentative. “We’re obviously still in or near Gotham—just in an alternate timeline.”

“Yeah, in the future. Possibly the _distant_ future.”

“They never did specify how old Bart might be…” Damian says, and it registers to Tim (with a measure of shock) that this was his way of agreeing with him. “I still don’t see why we would need another Speedster.”

Dick smiles tersely. “To be fair, the one we’ve got just fucked us four ways to Sunday.”

“That is a peculiar way to put it,” Damian mumbles. “But your point has been received. Thank you, Grayson.”

“No problem.”

From the entryway, Jason snaps his fingers to gather their collective attention. He takes a step backward, lifts the curtain, and gestures with his free hand for them to go outside. When nobody moves, he rolls his eyes. “Would you idiots take a look?” he asks, not at all treating his suggestion like it was optional.

The remaining three of them shuffle out of the tent, looking vaguely similar to a pack of toddling penguins with the way they were huddled. Damian’s hand is on Dick’s elbow, and Tim’s got both of his curled around Damian’s arm as though something terribly frightful might be awaiting them in the world outside their spawning point.

But no. Contrarily, everything was just as they remembered it from their own timeline, and from their own _time_ , in fact. Gotham didn’t look like it had changed a bit. If they ignored the distinct possibility of running into their counterparts from this dimension, this could have been a perfectly livable scenario, so at least there was that. Last time Barry screwed with the timeline, Bruce met with the terrible fate of seeing his father cursed with vengeance and his mother insanity. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

Of course, a warped timeline was still a warped timeline, much like a cute and fluffy bumblebee still had a vicious stinger attached to it. Appearances meant little to nothing in a world like this.

Jason takes the lead, which Damian sees fit to change within moments of their exposure to the great outdoors. As he shoves the man out of the way, Tim breaks free from his arm, shuffles to the edge of a smallish, grass-covered cliff and points to a nondescript spot in the distance. “Is it just me, or does that look like a cave to you guys?”

Dick squints at the spot Tim has picked out and answers definitively, “Not like a Bat-cave, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It wasn’t,” Tim replies.

“There’s a light on inside,” Jason says. “Wanna brave it?”

“We’re looking for Bart Allen,” Damian gripes, “not a random forest hermit.”

Dick hums thoughtfully. “But doesn’t it seem kind of weird for someone to be staying out here in the middle of nowhere like this? Gotham is a pretty big city… Even its outskirts are more populated than this. Where _are_ we?”

“Bruce seemed to know where he was going when he and The Terrible Timeline-Twister walked out of here,” Jason says. “So it stands to reason that we can’t be too far away, right?”

Tim shakes his head to the negative. “Not necessarily. The thing about Bruce is that he has a scarily accurate sense of direction.”

“And a Bat-watch,” Dick adds.

“And a Bat-watch,” Tim agrees. “So, neither direction nor mileage stands in their way. Us, though… Well, we’ve got absolutely nothing.”

“Don’t be like that, Timmy,” Dick says with an easygoing grin. “We’ve got each other.”

Jason scoffs. “Exactly. We’ve got nothing.” None of them take it to heart, because Jason’s made far worse jokes in far worse situations.

“We’re checking out the cave,” Dick decides. His tone leaves no room for arguments, but from the looks of it, there weren’t going to be any in the first place.

Carefully, the four of them clamber down from the ledge and venture toward the mysterious hideout, which they find was a great deal closer than they’d initially thought. Up close, it became obvious that the light they’d noticed was from a wicker lantern, perched carefully on a stool settled close to the mouth of the cave.

They’re all crouched behind a nearby bush when the so-called hermit emerges with nothing but a towel around his waist. He’s dripping wet from head to toe, which encompasses about six feet and five inches of brown flesh and taut muscle. Dick is staring, and the other boys are staring at him staring. “You go out first,” Tim whispers.

“Wait, what?” Dick whispers back as he reverts his attention to them, this time with a scandalized expression. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the one staring like he’s a feast and you’re a starving African child,” Jason hisses.

“I was just surprised to see someone here,” Dick defends, but Tim is shaking his head and Damian is rolling his eyes, so he cuts the argument short. “Okay, okay. Jesus. I’ll go. But if I get murdered—”

“Who’s there?” the stranger asks, twisting around to face the bushes. His eyes are a gorgeous, deep green but, more importantly, they’re narrowed at their hiding spot like so many gorgeous, green daggers. “Show yourself.”

Hesitantly, Dick rises to his feet. “Just a passerby,” he lies.

The stranger’s snarl relaxes into something resembling an amused grin. Though it’s barely a noticeable quirk of the mouth, the intent reads to Dick as plain as day, somehow. “Just a passerby who is interrupting my bath,” he says. “To whom do I owe the pleasure?”

Dick swallows an unbidden lump in his throat. There was something awfully familiar about that voice, about that _face_ , yet he couldn’t put his finger on it for all his detective skills. He’s so busy thinking about answering that he never actually does, and by the time he realizes how weird he’s making things, the stranger is dragging his gaze down his body like he’s—well, like he was a feast and the stranger a starving African child.

Well, then.

“Um, my name is Dick,” he answers at last. “I’m sorry about interrupting your bath.”

The man hums with a drip of something that sounds like it might be humor. “Why are you here, Dick?”

Reflexively, his eyes dart from the stranger’s face to his towel, then back again. He manages to steel himself against cringing at his own stupidity, but the victory is hollow considering the circumstances. “Err, I’m a little lost, actually. I was hoping you could help me.”

It should startle him more than it does when the man approaches him with two long, easy strides and grips his chin between thumb and forefinger to tilt his face upward. It should also instill in him more fear than it does arousal, but that would be something to deal with later, when his brothers _weren’t_ lurking in the bushes only two feet away.

He feels himself being scrutinized heavily, but that’s an easy sensation to deal with since he’d become so accustomed to it. The way the man’s going about it reminds him a little of Slade. And a little bit of Bruce. And a little bit of…

Dick isn’t sure what hits him first: the panic or the shame. Against all odds, he tamps down both and says with a deceptively steady voice, “You know, you never told me your name.”

“I didn’t,” the stranger agrees.

“It’s only polite,” Dick urges.

“Politeness doesn’t seem warranted when you’re the one snooping around my private hideout.”

Dick swallows thickly and pulls out the big guns, complete with his best half-lidded gaze, his hand on the stranger’s chest—the whole nine yards. “I think I oughta know the name of the man whose bath I interrupted. It’d make joining him for his next one a whole lot more comfortable.”

The corner of the stranger’s mouth quirks upward just a little higher. _Bingo._ “You do make a very good point. Since you’re so curious…” He takes a step backward, crosses his arms, cocks his head just the slightest bit like he’s still sizing him up. “My name is Damian Al-Ghul, and you’re in the right place if you’re trying to hide.”

Before Dick can eke out the question he wants to ask, which is, “What do you mean, ‘hide’?” a loud, grating peal of laughter arises from the bushes, draining his brain of all words and his face of all color.

“Todd, you imbecile!” Damian— _their_ Damian—cries.

“Shut up, Jason!” Tim hisses.

After that, there is a smacking sound, but Dick can’t even begin to guess which one of them slapped him. They all stand guiltily from the bush, even though it’s supremely clear Jason is still swallowing down more laughter and Damian looks like he’d rather be just about anywhere else.

The grin falls from the alternate-Damian’s face in a heartbeat. “What are you doing with them?” he asks. Something in his tone is accusatory, so Dick takes a step away.

“What—” he’s cut short by an embarrassingly nervous chuckle bubbling past his lips, but shakes the feeling away and clears his throat. “What do you mean? These are… It’s Jay and Tim and…”

“And _me_ ,” the alternate-Damian spits. “I’d sooner die than willingly associate with Bruce Wayne’s putrid little cretins.”

 _Okay, woah._ Dick blinks a few times. “Damian,” he says, “what is wrong with you? They’re… They’re your…”

Before he can finish the thought, their Damian steps up to bat, devoid of apprehension, with his hands on his hips and a peculiar kind of fire in his eyes. “What is your problem with Father?” he asks.

“‘Father’?” Alternate-Damian parrots. Not two seconds later, there’s an ugly sneer marring his features. “Just because I am biologically related to him does not make him my father. Slade is my father.”

 _Okay, woah: The Redux,_ Dick thinks.

His next breath is shaky. “Slade Wilson?”

“Of course. When that idiot Wayne abandoned my mother, Slade was there for us. As far as I’m concerned, that is what a real paternal figure does.”

“Wilson is a scumbag,” Jason interrupts with one brow lifted. “At least, in our universe he is.”

Alternate-Damian purses his lips, closes his eyes, and sighs deeply through his nose. “Listen, if any of you are seen around here, there will be trouble. Universe-hopping is serious. I highly recommend you return to your spawning point and stay there until I can—”

“Wait, you know about all of this?” Tim asks with renewed vigor. “Timeline-skipping?” He pushes his way past Jason and their Damian, marches all the way up to Dick’s side. “Then you can help us get home, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Alternate-Damian agrees, “but it is about to get dark. You need to go _now._ ”

“Okay, okay,” Tim assents, running a hand through his hair. “Wow. I can’t believe this is—we gotta tell Bruce! We might be able to get home without Bart after all.”

“That doesn’t explain what happened with Barry’s powers, though,” Jason says, snapping the excitement in half with one fell swoop of truth.

“I can figure it out,” Alternate-Damian promises. “But I am serious about you leaving. Meet me back here tomorrow morning with _Wayne_ ,” he says, like the name puts a bad taste in his mouth.

Jason looks at Tim, who looks at their Damian, who looks at Dick. For a while they all stand there looking at each other, until, eventually, they reach an agreement.

Dick faces the alternate-universe Damian and nods once, curtly. “All right. We appreciate the help.” He steps away to follow the rest of them, but the alternate catches him by the arm and stops him dead in his tracks with an alarming amount of strength pushing through with so little effort.

“Uh, I kinda gotta…” he flounders, looking between him and the rest of his group.

“You stay,” he commands.

Tim, Jason, and their Damian exchange more looks. The tension melts apart when Jason explodes into laughter again, and this time, Tim follows suit. “Oooookay,” the former says. “Just please return our boy in one piece, capishe?”

“Hickey-free, if you’re feeling generous,” Tim adds.

Their Damian wrinkles his nose, which is just as red as the rest of his face. “Would you heathens shut your mouths?”

“We need him to be able to walk straight,” Jason presses onward, ignoring their Damian entirely.

“God, if Bruce finds out…” Tim is clinging to Jason’s shoulder for dear life now, like if he didn’t then nothing could stop him from physically doubling over in laughter.

“Guys,” Dick snaps, turning redder than their Damian, which hardly seemed possible. “Get lost.”

After much prodding, they finally do as they’re told, and it brings him a little bit of relief, short-lived though it might have been.

The lack of knowledge about what lies ahead still tugs at him, incessantly lighting up the worry receptors in his brain. When he turns around to deal with the problem straight away, he’s at face level with a broad, naked chest and has to look up. It’s still something he’s getting used to. He prods the man’s ribcage in a silent gesture to urge him backward, but it goes ignored. Stubbornly, Dick remains where he is as well, even if that leaves them standing just a little too close.

“We need to talk,” Damian says at last.

Dick nods to the affirmative. “I guess the place to start here is, well, when Barry accidentally lobbed us into an alternate dimension.”

The response he gets is a click of the tongue, and it’s almost the same as _his_ Damian’s splenetic little “tt” sound. The thing he gleans from this is some things stay the same no matter the universe, but the thought brings him little comfort because he remembers what he’d said to this man. How he’d _looked_ at him. Just when he thinks he can’t feel any grimier about it, Damian says, “It certainly would be the place to begin, but that is not the subject I’m interested in right now.”

Right. Dick had been afraid of that. Still, he manages to recapture an iota of personal pride with an excuse. The oldest one in the book, in fact: “I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know,” Damian repeats dryly. “I don’t believe you. No matter the age difference, I refuse to accept that you could not differentiate us.”

“I couldn’t!” But, then, he looks him in the eye, feels that piercing gaze all the way down to his bones, and even though this technically isn’t his brother, he still can’t lie to him. “I mean, I didn’t notice…at first,” he admits, wilting with every word.

“You may not know me, but know that I am no fool. That look in your eye when you came closer…when you _propositioned_ me…” A sharp chill shoots up Dick’s spine, but he isn’t sure whether it’s from the mockingly innocent word choice or from the deliberate dip in Damian’s tone. “I recognized it.”

His nerves feel like fried wires whipping uselessly at nothing, and it all comes to a head when he finds himself being stared down for real now, with a hot intensity from which he can’t escape. He’s never stammered in the face of intimidation before, but something about this feels personal. “I—I’m sorry,” he grits out.

Damian’s whole face changes. It happens slowly, beginning with his brows shooting up and ending with the tiny twitch of the lips that Dick has come to know by heart. “Oh, I did not mean for you to feel sorry for it. I only meant…” For a moment, he appears to be in thought, and then his lips become a straight line again, just like that. He steps away, and with the loss in proximity comes a loss in heat, which Dick hadn’t even noticed was rising in his system until it was so suddenly vacuumed away. It almost makes his breathing hitch, but he manages to contain the sound.

“I’m sorry?” he says again, although this time it comes out as a question. “I’m honestly not tracking.”

“The look in your eyes was guilt, Dick. You knew who I was, yet you came _closer._ That is a rarity I would be crazy to overlook. I may not understand the fullest extent of your feelings for the version of me who lives in your world, but I know the look of a man who wants something he cannot have.” Damian hums, tilts his chin up a fraction, and leans casually against the cavern wall at his back. “I also know,” he continues, “there are ways to fix that.”

“I…are you… _flirting_ with me?” Dick asks, suddenly overcome by the ridiculousness of the situation in which he’s found himself. It doesn’t quite compare to world-hopping, granted, but it is certainly something.

“I’m simply extending you an offer I think would be mutually beneficial.” Damian turns, walks down the stretch of dimly-lit cave, and somehow manages to keep Dick trotting along after like some sort of trained dog without even saying anything else. Perhaps it’s the obvious promise in his voice, but Dick can’t possibly be looking forward to _that,_ because that would be wrong, wouldn’t it?

Then again, refusing a lucky stroke from an alternate dimension where consequence can’t follow him home seemed a bit like looking a gift horse in the mouth. And speaking of gift horses, there’s a decently-sized hot spring smack in the middle of the cavern floor, which reminds him (with a thrill in the pit of his stomach) of his earlier petition, as Damian had put it.

Unlike with the Butterfly Effect, snooping around in the future doesn’t do irrevocable damage to the past. So, really, what was the harm in having a little fun?

Perhaps one night of bad choices wouldn’t hurt.

“I seem to remember something about a bath,” he says, playing coy.

Damian chuckles once, like he’s in disbelief he’s even hearing those words leave Dick’s mouth, and that sure is a whole lot more like the Damian _he_ knows. He can’t tell if that makes this better or worse, but kicks the thought away before it can germinate and approaches the steaming pool of water with clear intent. There’s no verbal response to his toying, but there _are_ eyes on him when he drags his shirt up his chest and over his head, and that’s more than enough encouragement for him to reach down for the button on his jeans and say, “You know, since I so rudely cut yours short.”

“You did,” Damian agrees. “Isn’t that just like a Flying Grayson?”

Dick draws in a sharp breath and regards him with wonder. “You know who I am?”

“I knew the moment I saw you. It was why I assumed you were looking for a place to hide.”

“Why would I want to hide?” Dick asks, casting his eyes back toward the tempting spring and then back up to the equally-tempting vision of Damian dropping the towel into a puddle around his ankles.

“For all intents and purposes, your counterpart here is on the lam.”

“I, uh—” Dick clears his throat, tries again. “Why? What did I do?”

Damian sinks down into the water with a moan of contentment that had to be at least twenty percent overemphasized. The way he looks up at Dick with a knowing grin only makes him believe it more. “Oh,” he says, as though he’s really putting effort into thinking about it, “you have done unspeakable things.”

“Is that right?” he asks, playing along as he strips down and follows the other man into the water. It _does_ feel exceptionally nice, especially after the day he’s had, but he’s not showing off just yet, so he placates Damian with a soft sigh and sits calculatedly close to remind him that he’s still very much interested.

“It is absolutely right. A great many dirty, crooked things.”

Dick can’t repress the urge to smile. “Dirty and crooked, huh?” He sidles up against the other man’s shoulder, leans in, tips his head just a bit. He’s not sure if it’s the hot water or the proximity making him light-headed, but he doesn’t have time to figure it out before Damian’s fingers are gripping his chin and pulling him that much closer. “Doesn’t sound like me at all,” he finishes, perhaps more softly than when he’d begun.

“I find that a little disappointing,” Damian responds, matching the tone.

No further bantering precedes the harsh kiss Damian drags him into, and he’s only slightly ashamed of the burst of sparks it ignites behind his eyelids, the shock it sends pulsing through his body, right down to his toes. When he pulls back, just the necessary inch it takes to breathe, there’s a heated gasp in his wake and Damian (damn him) grins like he’d been expecting it. The look is bizarrely similar to one that Dick’s seen plenty of times before on Slade, and he thinks for only a sliver of a second that he should be disgusted by the fact, but then remembers who he’s with and what he’s _doing_ with him. He can’t help the grimace that curls his mouth, but Damian unravels it back into an open ‘o’ by sliding the hand on his chin down his chest and under the water, landing with a merciless grip on his upper thigh that Dick thinks has no business being as big a turn-on as it is.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he practically purrs into his ear. It’s all-knowing, like he can see directly into Dick’s head without even trying. With Ra’s Al-Ghul’s peculiar brand of magic, it’s not a stretch to assume that this is true, but he hopes and prays it isn’t, rather than ask about it.

“I’m sorry,” Dick says automatically. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Then do not stop,” Damian says, like it’s that plainly simple. “You can’t face a fear by ignoring it, Grayson.”

He starts to say something to the effect of how preposterous he finds that train of thought, but then Damian gets his mouth on the tender stretch of skin beneath Dick’s ear and laves his tongue across it, sending more crackles of sensation through his body, and he suddenly can’t remember why he was worried in the first place.

At least until Damian ungraciously reminds him, breath hot in his ear as he whispers, “If you want brotherly love, I can certainly deliver.”

His breathing stops entirely for a few seconds. “That’s—” He only gets that far before his lungs restart, though, and that’s just in time for Damian to crawl into his lap and shove him back into the edge of the pool by the arms.

Dick grunts, and shoving back is just muscle memory by this point. Damian hardly budges since he’s got his calves locked securely on either side of Dick’s thighs, so he’s still in range to grab him by the wrists and—and he’s _wrestling_ him, just like Dick does with Jason, with Tim, with _his_ Damian.

Bruce and Talia’s DNA combined with Slade’s probably-strict upbringing make Damian the likely candidate to win in a match like this, purely muscle-to-muscle. Dick’s best weapon would be his flexibility, but Damian has him pinned by both legs and arms, so that wasn’t going to work, either.

“You are such a…” His breath catches in his throat again when Damian rolls his hips downward, rubs them together for just a flickering moment of blissful contact.

“Such a what?” he teases.

“Brat,” Dick says, almost reluctantly, but the glint in Damian’s eyes fuels him further. “You didn’t used to be so big,” he adds, feeling the shame creep through his veins like fire.

Damian pretends to scowl, stares him down like he’s truly annoyed, and says, “Maybe you just never noticed how pathetically _small_ you are.” Dick’s next breath is just the slightest bit shaky, but he’s saved from having to respond when he feels the pressure ease off one arm and reinstate itself elsewhere. “But not where it counts,” Damian says, draping himself across Dick’s front and pressing Dick’s cock against his stomach. He smooths his hand up and down the length of it, catches him by the mouth before he can say anything snarky or self-fulfilling, which he really, _really_ wants to. It’s kind of unnerving how easily he falls into the pattern of sibling taunting.

Damian swipes his tongue along the seam of Dick’s lips and reminds him what he’s supposed to be doing, and so, dutifully, he parts them, lets him in. Dick’s always been good at this part: the kissing, the intimacy. He curls his free arm around Damian’s back, pulls him close enough that he can’t move his hand anymore and so resorts to grinding down on him.

The moan he gives echoes embarrassingly loudly in the confines of the cave; he hears his voice being thrown back at him, echo after echo, and, obviously, so can Damian. He looks pleased with himself but Dick can tell, however faint it is, that there’s a blush rising on his face. There’s not too much patience left to spare, if he knows at least part of him well enough, so he uses the distraction to wrench his arm free and settle his palms on the cave floor behind him. He lifts himself from the water, sliding his legs cleanly out from underneath the other’s, and sits, baring it all to the cool air.

When Damian hungrily palms his thighs apart, Dick lets him. He waits just long enough for the man to get an eyeful and look up at him, pupils blown, before he puts him in a headlock, secured between his knees, and laughs when Damian chokes a little. His hands are scrambling to pry him off, but to no avail.

“Not fair, Grayson,” he gurgles.

“You weren’t playing fair, either,” he says, relishing the victory for a moment before letting him go. He’s about to slide his legs off Damian’s shoulders, but large, swift-moving hands clamp down on his shins before he can manage it. He should’ve expected that, honestly.

Suffice it to say he had not.

He feels grossly exposed as he is, sitting back on his tailbone with absolutely every part of him he did not want to show off right at Damian’s eye level. “Okay,” he groans, “let go. You win.”

“I know,” is all Damian says before he shifts upward and all but dumps Dick onto his back with an ungraceful shout. He bends his legs backward until his knees hit the ground, and at the very least this puts a pleasantly stunned expression on Damian’s face because everything else about this position is humiliating. “You are…awfully flexible,” he says.

“Yeah,” Dick grunts, stupidly simplistic for all he wants to say. What he goes with instead is a change in direction, which he affects with a question. “You don’t have any lube in this _cave_ , do you?”

Damian scoffs, flicks his gaze away as if that impedes the procession of blood rising to his cheeks, and says, “Boredom doesn’t cease when one is in hiding.”

“Neither does jacking off, I guess,” Dick answers with a wolfish grin.

Suddenly, he grabs Dick’s cock like he intends to use it as a weapon and gets close enough to where the leer he gives actually holds some merit. “I entreat you to remember which of us is on our back.”

Dick is positive the pathetic little moan with which he replies isn’t the right answer to a threat, but then again there aren’t many right answers he’s given today.

When Damian rises to fetch the necessary tools for what Dick knows they shouldn’t be doing, he lowers his legs, sinks his feet back into the water and sighs at the comfort. The next logical step is to wrap his hand around himself and start stroking, but he gets a little lost in it because he’s caught completely unaware when Damian returns, and when he opens his eyes, the man is looking down at him with arms crossed and his mouth set firmly into a smirk.

“You really inherited your father’s expressions,” Dick huffs. He doesn’t stop jerking himself, even once Damian lowers himself to his knees and pops the cap on the bottle in his hands.

“Which one?” Damian asks, and it’s the smart-ass in his voice that violently throws Dick’s mental image from Slade to Bruce, which reminds him all over again why he shouldn’t be doing this. But the thrill outweighs the concern, and the lust outweighs it all, so that was another watery-fingered pinch to the flaming wick of his guilt.

“Pick one,” he answers at last. “I’ve fucked ‘em both.”

Damian’s eyes go wide, then narrow when the thought stirs around a little in his head. He pours lube over his palm, bevels his hand around and watches it drip over and between his fingers, and clambers over the man’s legs. “That is a terrible bluff,” he says.

“I’m not a good liar,” Dick returns, keeping his game face on. It gets harder when Damian’s lifting one of his legs out of the way, swinging his own back into place and jostling his bobbing cock until the image of it is burnt into Dick’s short-term. He’s trying not to be obvious about staring, or about how his mouth is watering a little, but he imagines he’s failed.

“Yes, you are,” Damian says like he _knows_. “Hold your leg.”

Dick doesn’t know why he automatically obeys, gripping hard at the back of his knee and holding it out of the way so that he’s exposed again. His other hand is still vigilantly working, and now it’s wet with pre-cum, so he knows he’s in deep now.

He’s about to say something, but his mouth goes dry when Damian sinks one finger into him, no preamble, no preparation other than the slick coat of lube he’s got across his hand. So, what he ends up saying is an emphatic, “ _Jesus,_ ” but that doesn’t seem to do much but get Damian to smirk again.

“Be careful, Grayson. You’re getting your gods confused.”

Dick feels grossly subjugated and _loves_ it. “You’re still a brat,” he breathes, focusing on relaxing his muscles. It takes getting his hand off himself for the effort to work, but that doesn’t mean his cock isn’t still jumping at every forward intrusion like he’s a downright glutton for it.

“The brat is on top,” Damian informs him, like he needs to be reminded.

“When did we decide that?”

There’s no answer this time; only a concentration of movement in his ass that he hasn’t felt in months and because of such manages to feel entirely foreign. Plus, last time there was anything there at all it was a _toy,_ and he isn’t going to mention that, but—

“Who is the last person to do this you?”

He’s genuinely beginning to get worried that Damian can somehow hear his thoughts, but when he furiously thinks the name that answers that question, Damian’s face doesn’t change, so maybe he can’t. “Who do you think?” he tries.

“Yourself,” Damian answers.

“I hate you,” Dick says.

“Tut, tut,” Damian deadpans. He presses another finger in alongside the first, crooks them and just strokes along his walls until he’s squirming and then says, “I noticed that you have a serious problem with patience.”

“Well, you’re—” He thinks he might have made an incriminating “nng” sound sometime before the words stop coming, but he can barely remember his own name when the shock of his prostate being stimulated lights up his whole body.

“I’m what?” Damian asks, marking his successful search by sneaking in a third finger that might have been a little premature if the sting said anything, but Dick doesn’t _care_ because that just means there’s more surface area knocking against the spot. He could honestly let himself cum right there if he wanted to, but control is important, especially in these circumstances, and so he does not. Then he’s being spoken to again and he has to pause and rewire his brain to remember how to interpret sentences because what he’s being told isn’t making sense.

“Can you repeat that?” he asks in a series of panted words aimed at the ceiling.

“I said you look like a whore,” Damian answers shortly.

Dick can’t help that he laughs, or that he’s practically breathless when he does. “What?” He can see the bob of Damian’s Adam’s apple when he swallows, and it makes him want to bite him, sink his teeth in and devour.

“You heard me,” Damian growls, jabbing his fingers into him with a sort of brutalism that should cut off Dick’s giggles (god, he was _giggling_ ) but somehow does not. But then he’s twisting them, hitting his prostate dead on with more power than before and muttering all the while about how he looked such-and-such way, with his legs spread and his tongue lolling, accepting the onslaught blindly like he’d die without it. If it weren’t for the crumb of common sense he had left, the insults might have made Dick drool.

“God, god, god,” he starts, voice pitching upward in a surge of heat. “Wait, slow down,” he tries, but his words are only after-thoughts intermingled with deep, needy moans that tell the truth better than anything he’s said so far ever could.

“That’s flattering,” Damian grunts, like he’s losing control just watching him, “but I was merely kidding about my divinity. You’ll find I’m as human as—” He sucks in a breath when Dick cuts him off with a growl of his name and forgoes the remainder of his sentence in favor of watching him buck his hips up against his fingers, taking him down to the knuckles and throwing his head back against the rock. He’s not even touching himself even though he’s leaking obscenely down his length; both of his hands are on the ground at his sides, scraping uselessly without finding the purchase of skin he so craves.

He’s only halfway aware of Damian’s hand creeping up the leg he’d let fall aside without his hand to hold it, but then that hand is squeezing warmth around the head of his cock and he’s honestly not able to keep his eyes open anymore.

“You should hear yourself,” Damian whispers into his ear, and _Christ,_ when had he gotten that close? “Just ‘oh, oh, oh…’ all for me. All over three little fingers. What are you going to do when it’s my cock, huh? What then?”

Dick lets out another long, tortured “nng” sound and turns his head to catch Damian by the mouth. It’s all he can do to stifle the embarrassing moan that comes when he finally cums, striping his abdomen and dripping down Damian’s knuckles.

He’s out for a few seconds trying to control his breathing. Vaguely, he registers the sound of more lubricant being squirted, and not a moment sooner than he’d lifted himself up on his elbows did Damian yank him up by the hips and align himself to his hole. His teeth are clenched, too, which Dick wants to comment on but can’t because by the time he thinks of the words, he’s being split open in the way he hasn’t been in upwards of two years.

His head hits the ground again as he sighs, long and deep, into the air. All he can focus on is how warm he is, how he can feel himself opening around the intrusion and how it makes him feel so _full_. Briefly, he wonders why he ever stopped messing with that toy of his.

All movements still. He’s hyper-aware of the patterns of his own breathing as much as he is of Damian’s, but even that takes a backseat to the slightly sticky warmth of their skin-to-skin contact, where the other man has lowered himself down and put them chest to chest. There are hands on his hips, nails in his flesh, and then Damian is kissing him again and it makes him forget that he’s not going to be able to do this forever, like he wants to.

He can pursue his secondary wants, though, which he does when he latches his mouth to Damian’s neck and tastes him, salt and sweat, sucking what’s no doubt going to be a dark hickey onto his skin. Damian moans for what Dick thinks might be the first time during this affair, because he’s finally above the roaring of his own blood in his ears. He wants more of that for sure, but while he’s debating where to leave the next mark, Damian’s pulling out and it’s Dick who makes the next sound, low and deep from somewhere in his chest.

That doesn’t top the satisfied groan that comes next, when he’s being slammed into like a gun being loaded and feels not far from it. There’s a fire prickling across his skin every time their hips meet, harsh and animalistic. Dick doesn’t remember when he’d gotten his arms around the other’s neck but they’re there, nonetheless, and so he digs his nails into his shoulders like Damian’s doing to his hips right now.

He’s practically being fucked into the ground and he knows there will be bruises—purple-blue remnants of an illicit affair he really had no business having. But, then, it was a different universe and there weren’t going to be consequences, right? So, what was the harm? There are answers to that, of course. Plenty of them. But he simply can’t think past what’s in front of him, which is sinewy muscles and brown skin and piercing green eyes.

There’s so much sensation that he forgets his own anatomy until Damian bends his legs back again and rocks his hips back into his sweet spot, stimulating every nerve he thought burnt out from his last orgasm. There are rolling waves of pleasure all over again, and then he’s so fucked-out he can’t do anything but moan, one long string of curses that might have been peppered with Damian’s name.

“So good for me,” Damian praises, right in his ear once more. “Takes it so well.”

He manages a somewhat garbled, “God, yes,” that gets swallowed by Damian’s mouth anyway. His hands slide from the man’s shoulders up into his hair and pull, hard. He’s rewarded for his efforts with another moan, deeper and rawer than the others.

“You gonna come for me, Dami?” he whispers against the skin of the man’s jaw.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Damian grounds out. He’s intensely focused like he can’t afford to be anything else, and that’s so much like his outer-dimension counterpart that Dick can’t resist the chuckle bubbling from his lips.

“Don’t think,” he offers, lifting his legs to wrap around the man’s midsection. “Just fuck me.”

The comment is clearly received because the mindful resolve crumbles into something softer; Damian closes his eyes, parts his lips and mutters quiet little “ah” sounds that get progressively more shivery as they go on.

“Don’t worry,” Damian grunts, “I will pull out.”

“No,” Dick breathes, clutching him by the back of the neck and rolling his hips back against his thrusts the best he can with his legs circled around him. “Cum inside.”

There isn’t a follow-up statement, but there is a sound of exertion that accompanies Damian rising to his knees, shifting Dick’s legs off his back in the process. He plants his palms on Dick’s inner thighs and rocks into him until he’s curling in on himself the slightest bit. His abdominal muscles spasm when he cums, but Dick is far more focused on the way his teeth catch his bottom lip, which does little to affect the moan that spills out.

Dick is still half-consciously rutting up against him when he starts jerking again, which is bringing him closer to being over-sensitized by the second, but he doesn’t stop—just watches with eyes half-lidded as Damian pulls out and sits back on his calves to give him an audience. “You know,” the latter says in a winded voice, “it is a shame we won’t get to do this again. I could get used to it.”

“Don’t remind me,” Dick says, squeezing his eyes closed as if to fight the thought. His words are all half-groaned by this point but he doesn’t care—just wants to cum again and he can feel it building in the pit of his stomach, burning and tightening his muscles.

After a preliminary shaky inhalation, Damian crawls back over him and layers his hand over Dick’s, enveloping it with such ease that Dick is reminded how _big_ he is. “God, I’ll miss you more than I thought.”

“I think you might just miss the sex,” Damian comments with an amused smile that soon fades into something unidentifiable in Dick’s current messy state of mind. “It is rather unfortunate we could not have met in a better place.”

“Or a better time,” Dick says. He isn’t even sure if he’s joking.

“I’m certain your timeline treats us both better than mine does.” He digs his elbow into the ground by Dick’s his head to steady himself, leans down and kisses for just a second, then rebuilds his grin. “But it has been a blessing to lie with you.”

Dick props himself up, forcing Damian to straighten, and huffs a breath of warning that is not ignored. When he speeds his hand up, Damian pushes it out of the way and replaces it with his own. Seconds later, Dick tips over the edge again with a sound embarrassingly close to a sob, and Damian leads him through it with whispers of encouragement.

They both sit in silence for a terribly long stretch of silence after that. Damian’s watching him breathe long after he’d laid back again, arms stretched comfortably above his head, left wrist in right hand. He doesn’t look at him for a while, but eventually he moves off his legs and Dick’s instinct is to track the motion.

He’s washing off, which reminds Dick he ought to do the same and so he scoots to the edge of the spring and dips his feet first, then bends over to do the same with his hands. It’s quiet and comfortable, actually, which is strange when one is with a stranger. Except, Damian isn’t quite a stranger, and they’ve beaten around that bush as much as they possibly could, so perhaps it was time to talk it out.

Dick chooses the easy approach. “So, hey, have you ever actually _met_ the me who lives in this dimension?”

“Once,” Damian replies curtly.

“What’s he like?” Dick gives him a sideways look while he smooths the water over his thighs and chest, trying to wipe off the muck. “I mean, aside from ‘dirty and crooked.’”

That’s met with a snort, followed by: “A downright ass.”

“Did you sleep with _him?_ ” Dick thinks he should crack a smile or laugh like it’s a joke, but it’s a genuine question and Damian treats it as such.

“Yes,” he admits. “It’s kind of why I’m in hiding.”

Dick’s eyes go wide at the admittance and tries to piece together everything he’s been told today with this new bit of information. “So, what?” His brow crinkles in thought. “I’m some kind of criminal? And if you associated with me, I guess that means someone out there thinks of you as aiding and abetting, huh?”

“I knew you were smart,” Damian says, and Dick earnestly can’t tell whether he’s being sarcastic.

“Okay. So, I guess the only question left is…who is the ‘someone' we’re talking about?”

“Your parents.”

That answer hadn’t been one he’d considered—wasn’t among the lot, not even for a second. Truth be told, he was so caught up in his private affairs that he’d nearly forgotten about the fact he wasn’t even in his own timeline, and _that_ thought rung up a hundred more along with it. Like, for instance, he was supposed to be finding a way home, not sleeping with technical strangers in their cavernous hideouts in the middle of the woods.

Another consideration, though, was that he could see his parents again: see how they’ve aged, what they were like. Then again, he has no idea what his counterpart had done, or if his parents would even want to see him because of it.

Finally, after several minutes of processing, which Damian thankfully had not interrupted, he asks, “Do you know where my parents are?”

“Not currently,” Damian answers, as if there had been no lull in the conversation at all. “Although, finding the whereabouts of a popular circus is far from difficult.”

Dick weighs his options. On one hand, he’s a glaring target in this version of Gotham, both as himself and as a time-traveler, and he’s not sure law enforcement would believe that his presence there was an accident. On the other hand, though…

“What are they like?” he tries, hoping that maybe he can glean enough to satisfy his curiosity.

“Ah.” That’s all Damian says for a second. He looks at Dick like a book he’s studying, and Dick is suddenly reminded that he’s sitting naked on a cave floor, followed by the equally daunting reminder of _why_ he’s sitting naked on a cave floor. “I was not aware that you…”

“Yeah,” Dick says, a little awkwardly, “I lost my parents a long time ago. It’s weird that I never thought about them being alive here.”

“To be fair to yourself, you were otherwise occupied.”

Dick laughs, rubs the back of his neck. “You got me there.”

Damian draws one leg toward his chest and rests his forearm on it as he stares at the cave ceiling. “If it is of any consolation, they are wonderful people.”

“Aren’t they hunting you?” Dick asks, confused. “I’m not sure ‘wonderful people’ do that.”

“You do that, don’t you?” Damian looks at him, but when Dick can’t find it in himself to answer, he flickers his eyes to the water instead and changes course. “Yes, they are looking for me. They think I know the whereabouts of their son.”

“And…do you?”

For some reason, the wan smile with which Damian responds surprises Dick. It looks so unusual on the planes of his face that he can’t help but lay a hand on his shoulder. The gesture wasn’t even sensical to him, even though he was the one making it. Was it meant to be comforting? Beseeching? He honestly didn’t know, and he couldn’t even begin to think about it before Damian was looking at him with his usual calculating gaze again.

Still, he says nothing. What he does is get to his feet and offer a hand to help Dick stand as well, which he accepts. The two of them get dressed in what had quickly become a strange type of silence, but it doesn’t last much longer than the time it takes for Damian to pull on a cloak, which is only a step down in weirdness level from a cape. Briefly, Dick wonders what Damian actually does in this universe. If he works for Slade, for someone else, or for himself; if he’s a vigilante like in Dick’s universe, or something closer to an assassin. For all he knew, Damian could’ve been an accountant with a stroke of bad luck.

Now that he’s thinking beyond the realm of flesh and all related pleasures, he finds that he has quite a few questions, but no time for them to be answered, because there’s a voice yelling his name in the distance that makes them both spin toward the cave entrance, their bodies twisted in defensive positions.

“One of yours?” Damian asks, eyes narrowed. He has blades in his hands that Dick didn’t even see him unsheathe, so, yeah, definitely not an accountant.

“I’m not sure,” Dick answers. It takes a bit of listening with a closer ear to determine that, yes, it _is_ one of his. He’s not sure whether that’s a relief or not. “It’s Barry,” he says, easing his muscles back into a relaxed state.

“The Speedster?” Damian asks with a curl of his lip. “He should know better than to be creeping around in a timeline he’s destroyed.”

Dick snorts. “You don’t know much about the Allens, do you?”

The question goes unanswered, as Barry reaches the mouth of the cave before any further commentary can be made, and the look in his eyes tells Dick they’ve found a solution to their time-warping issue. That, at least, _does_ come as a relief. It’s about all that does, though, because when Barry catches sight of Damian he blows out an impressed breath and says, “Man, the boys weren’t kidding. You really did shack up with your not-so-little brother.”

Dick wants to disappear into the cave walls at the realization that Barry knows, but even more so at the knowledge that Barry will inevitably tell Bruce, if he hasn’t already. It had been a pretty decent life, but he’d have to face that it would soon come to an end. Tonight might just be the night the no-killing rule is broken, because Dick had laid hands on Damian (never mind that it wasn’t their Damian) and Bruce was, certifiably, going to throttle him.

“Ugh,” he grates out as he wipes his palm across his face. “Why are you here, Barry?”

“Oh!” Barry exclaims, having genuinely forgotten the point for the seconds it took to process future Damian’s face and implicit carnal relationship to the man he’d come here to see. “Your pop and I figured out the glitch with my powers. No other Speedster needed! So, uh, your job here is done…” He looks like he wants to say more about the mission, but what he launches into instead is another impressed, “Wow. I mean, he’s huge. Like father like son, right? You don’t have, like, a muscle kink or something, do you? Because—”

“Barry!” Dick snaps, aggravated at the attention-deficit and at Damian’s proud smirk alike. “So, what, we can go home?”

“Right. Yes! Home,” Barry agrees, rubbing the back of his neck. “Home is where the heart is. Home is where the…actually _little_ little brothers are…”

Dick gives an agonized groan and flattens his palms against Barry’s back to push him outside. “Tell them I’ll be there in a flash, ‘kay?”

“They didn’t laugh at that the first time, dude,” Barry supplies matter-of-factly.

“That’s not the point. The point is get lost. _Now._ ”

Barry does, but that only leaves them with a blessed two seconds of silence before he’s back in a blur of colors. “They said, and I quote, ‘quit banging him and come back now,’ end quote.”

Dick sighs so deeply he thinks he can feel his muscles rebooting. “All right. I’m coming.” But before he moves, he turns back to Damian and makes a vague gesture with one hand. It’s halfway an attempt at communication and halfway an attempt at stalling so he can think of the right thing to say, but Damian only sweeps his gaze up and down his body like he had when they’d first met, almost as if memorizing his presence. Finally, he says, “It was a pleasure, Flying Grayson.”

He doesn’t know why his first instinct is to laugh nervously like a schoolchild, but he quells that in favor of flashing the good-boy smile the girls he’s dated always fall for and hopes that makes him look less dweeby than he feels right now, thanks to Barry. It might have worked, if not for his next words being, “Back at you, man.”

There’s a spitting sound when Barry can hardly contain his laughter, and Dick sighs again and grabs him by the shoulder. “Okay. I’m ready to go, already.”

“I’m sorry, hold on—” Barry clears his throat, makes a rather unattractive snorting noise, and gives his best impression of a Zen face, which Dick doubts Barry has ever actually worn.

“You know,” Damian starts, “perhaps I will seek out your counterpart in this dimension and give him one last shot…”

Dick grins with all his teeth. “Yeah? Well, I’m glad to have inspired you.”

Damian snorts at that. “All right, Grayson. You’ve made your presence here very well-known.”

“Yeah, I bet he has,” Barry says with another strained half-laugh. “Come on, kiddo. I think Papa Bear’s gonna wanna have a talk with you when we get home.”

Call it crazy, but with the day he’s had, Dick finds he’s become impenitently resigned to his fate. “Oh, yes,” he says, somewhat wistfully, “I don’t doubt that at all.”

At the tent he’s a little too contact-high to bother rebuffing Jason and Tim’s taunts, or to weather through Bruce’s crackling static stare, but he’s perfectly capable of acknowledging Damian’s curious look with one of his own that promises quite the story. What he gets in return is the quirk of the lip—the little one that isn’t nearly a smile to the untrained eye—that tells him the story will be received with interest.

And, well, he’s had weird days before, but none quite as weird as this one.


End file.
